Bitty: Mom, why don’t they want old people at this park?
Me: Er, I’m sure they don’t mind having older people here.
Bitty: But there’s a sign! It says No Old People.
Me: Where did you see this? How do you know it’s for old people?
Bitty: Because the guy in the picture is holding a cane…
{I’ll let you decide: No Hiking Sign or No Old People Sign ; }
This is one of those ‘I found it on Pinterest’ recipes that actually turned out the way it said it would. It’s also one of those recipes that didn’t require I look up what an ingredient is, and I like that in a recipe.
Side note: I do not make recipes that require that I figure out what an ingredient is.
What I love most about this recipe is that I usually have everything I need to make it just sitting in my kitchen:
{Important to note: While Quaker Oats seem to do fine for me, if you want truly gluten-free, try Bob’s Red Mill. They have awesome gluten-free stuff.}
Although the websites that I found this recipe on call them Skinny Chunky Monkey Cookies and Skinny Monkey Cookies, I call them Chocolate Blobs. I don’t even use chocolate, but that’s what they look like, so that’s what I’m sticking with. Let’s get to the recipe, shall we?
{EDITED: apparently mocha powder contains cocoa power, so Chocolate Blobs is pretty much right on the money. THE POWER OF THE GOOGLE, PEOPLE!}
Now, here’s the thing to note: I love the ‘batter’ of this stuff. There have been several occasions where I really only made maybe eight little blobs, because that’s all that was left once I had finished munching on the raw batter. I REGRET NOTHING.
Also, I was making tiny little bite-size blobs initially, but because they were so small I would end up eating ten of them. So, now I use a small ice cream scoop to measure them out and am good with eating just one as a snack. See how I fixed that?
A few more things to note: These are really good straight out of the oven. After that, they should be refrigerated or frozen as they’re not terribly sweet. That’s not a bad thing necessarily, but seeing as I like things that are very sweet, I keep them frozen. Also, it makes them look a little bit like a meatball and when I don’t want to share it’s possible that I have told the kids that it was, in fact, a meatball.
That’s all there is to it. Quick to throw together and tasty to munch on. Enjoy!
Special thanks to Once A Month Mom for sharing this recipe!
We currently have our tent set up in the backyard and I’m becoming concerned that it may be there for a really long time.
The first night out, the BLT camped out together. Same thing the next night. I snuck out a few times to listen to them and could hear T Bub giving play-by-play of Doctor Who episodes. I guess those are the new ‘campfire stories’, and the girls were thoroughly engrossed, only asking questions every few minutes:
“Wait, why didn’t the Doctor just use the sonic screwdriver to open the door?”
“Because it doesn’t work on wood.”
Of course.
Now however, the kids are asking for sleep overs in the tent. They’ve been trying to work out a schedule of who can sleep in it on what nights and so forth. Which is great, but for one exception: Bitty. At six, Bitty has yet to have her first sleep over and I sure as heck am not having it in a tent. A six year old sleep over sounds like a whole lot of trouble, and a six year old sleep over IN A TENT sounds like a nightmare.
Here’s what I imagine a sleep over involving six years olds to be*:
*this may not be a realistic representation of two six year olds having a sleep over, but what do I know.
So, I came up with a solution - I would sleep out in the tent with her. She wasn’t exactly jumping up and down in excitement at this news and frankly, I wasn’t all that excited either. While I love camping, I realize the part I love the most is the part where we go somewhere; sleeping in my backyard on a blowup bed is not my idea of a jolly good time.
Side Note: My use of the words ‘jolly good time’ show I’ve been spending too much time watching the London Olympics.
Thankfully for me, a thunderstorm blew in, the siren went off, and at midnight, I dragged Bitty back in the house where we could both sleep in our own beds. All was right with the world until Lovely L invited another friend to sleep over and we started this whole process all over again.
“WHY CAN’T I HAVE A SLEEPOVER IN THE TENT?”
*sigh* I guess I’ll be sleeping in the tent again ; )
I think I must be doing this wrong. Somewhere along the line, I missed out on some essential child-rearing information; maybe I lost the manual…
Okay, okay. But if there had been a manual, I would have lost it.
Every day, my seriously awesome and adorable children come home from school and I pull up their daily school report thingy. It tells us what grades they got on what and if there are any missing assignments still outstanding.
And this is when I start to feel twitchy.
‘Why is this still showing as missing?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe the teacher forgot to enter it in?’
‘REALLY?’
‘Er. I don’t think I turned it in’
Frustration starts to set in.
‘This one is STILL missing?!? It’s from March!’
‘I finished that. But I don’t remember if I turned it in either.’
At some point in this process, I become completely amazed that I haven’t pulled all of my hair out. Or thrown something. Which only happened once, scared the bejezus out of both myself and the kid, and left me with an underlying guilt concerning books and how they’re not known for their flying ability.
It’s also at this point that I begin to feel that somewhere, somehow, I have failed to teach these kids how to be successful in school, which in turn will lead to their failure at adult life, and that in twenty years, I’ll find them living in a van down by the river.
I guess I assumed that if MC and I always made school a priority, that the kids would too. Not the case, as I’m finding out. But maybe that’s okay… no, really!
Because it makes me have to look at my kids as a whole and not just the reflection of their grades, I have found some really amazing qualities that I might not have noticed otherwise.
Also, I might just be saying that to make myself feel better about this situation.
How do you feel when your kids don’t perform to your expectations? Or perhaps this only happens to my kids…
(sigh)
Bitty is doing pretty well with Simon* and even reminds me to put it back on her in the morning.
*the heart monitor. Yes, she named it.
{Bitty & Simon}
She does come straight home and try to take it off, but she’s supposed to wear it until bedtime; it only takes a little bit of convincing (read: candy) to get her to snap it back on. The little stickies that hold the electrodes onto her chest irritate her skin and leave little red circles. I know that’s what’s bothering her about wearing it so I let her keep it off last weekend. (Bad parent, I know…)
Funny story: I took Bitty to the birthday party of a friend from school last Saturday. When the other little girls at the party saw her, they yelled ‘Bionic Bitty!’ (Okay, they did not yell Bitty; they yelled her real name. No, Bitty is not her real name ; ) Calling her Bionic B--- is how we convinced her that wearing this monitor would be cool – I guess it worked.
Anywho, here’s the information that I currently have: so far the monitor has only caught what the lady at the U* called ‘sinus tachycardia’, which I think is just a fancy name for ‘elevated heart rate’.
*that’s local speak for the University of Minnesota. Bitty is being seen at their pediatric cardiology specialists office.
A normal ‘resting’ heart rate for a child her age is around 75-115. When Bitty is pushing the button on the monitor, it’s catching a heart rate of 150 to 160. Sometimes. Because other times, it’s only reading 102 and I think she just wants to go sit in Nurse A’s office. Because Bitty thinks Nurse A is the bomb diggity and she has a white board in there that Bitty draws pretty pictures on.
The way it was explained to me is that the cardiologist is looking for a heart rate above 200; that is what they described as SVT. I don’t think they’ve caught anything that high on the monitor, although we’ll have to address why she’s having a resting rate of 150-160 at some point in this process.
{Mom! Take my picture like this!}
That’s really all the information I have right now. We will meet with her Dr. soon to discuss the results of monitor and to see what we do next…
Bitty is dealing pretty well with the event monitor that she has to wear. She’s only required to wear it while she’s awake, although the other night it was beating so quickly that it woke her up; I groggily awoke to a high pitched gurgling/whimpering noise. I almost took out my nightstand in my frantic attempt to get to her, then scooped her up and held her until she fell back asleep. It took me a long time to work up to leaving her room, but I needed to go downstairs and tell MC what had happened.
Thankfully though, that doesn’t seem to be the norm.
{Getting the monitor}
She cried when I asked her to attach the leads (the wires that connect to the monitor) to the electrodes stuck on her chest this morning though. So far we haven’t caught an event, due to the fact that most of the time it’s almost impossible for the adults to tell when it’s happening. She definitely knows, but she’s so busy that she doesn’t take the time to tell us, or even to push the button on the monitor herself. We only find out later that day, when we’re asking the questions about ‘crazy heart’ (her words) that she realizes she forgot to tell someone.
But back to the subject at hand: How did we wind up with a six year old wearing a heart monitor?
We were packing for our spring break trip down to Arizona and I realized Bitty had been a little under the weather. Runny nose, tired and a tummy ache, but no fever or vomiting. I packed her off to school and realized that if she did have something more than a cold and we had to take her to an urgent care down south, our insurance would blast us with some ridiculous ‘out of range’ fee. So, in the interest of her health and our financial security, I made an appointment to check for what I thought could possibly be strep.
The nurse did the quick strep test and then the Dr. came in to check her over. He went to listen to her lungs and immediately sat back, looked at me and said, ‘so, how long has that been going on?’
It was when Bitty answered and said, ‘Oh that happens all the time!’, that I sheepishly had to admit that I had felt it once before. I left the pediatrician’s with a script for an antibiotic (the strep test was positive) and instructions to get an EKG.
Side note: why do I most often see the abbreviation as EKG, when the test is an electrocardiogram? Granted EKG is easier to say than ECG, which sounds like you’re sneezing if said too quickly…
So right now, we sit in a kind of holding pattern while we wait to figure out what’s going on. Is this SVT? Will it go away on its own? I don’t have any answers right now, and that is more frustrating than anything; some kind of diagnosis would as least lead to some kind of known action on our part, instead of this standing around feeling useless, and sometimes, helpless.
Philippians 4:6
Bitty is being tested for SVT, or supraventricular tachycardia. What we know is that she is experiencing an extremely rapid heart rate that seems to have no immediate (external) cause. The good news is that it really doesn’t seem to bother her, although occasionally it makes her dizzy* enough that she needs to sit down.
*When the heart is beating that quickly, it’s not pumping oxygenated blood effectively throughout the body. The dizziness is a result of that brief lack of oxygen. Think of the feeling you get when you’re blowing up a balloon; it’s like that.
She was fitted with an ‘Event Monitor’ yesterday; it will record an episode when she pushes a button. The monitor consists of two sticky pads that attach on either side of her chest and the monitor itself – a small round piece of plastic with two buttons – one to record an ‘event’ (the rapid heart rate), and one to send the information at the end of the day. I have a feeling that the company that receives this info is going to get pretty irate at us pretty fast, as Bitty seems to press the send button every time she plays.
It’s hard to look at this kid and say there’s anything wrong; she looks perfectly happy:
Well, I take that back. She is pretty much fed up with the monitor already; it is impeding her play time and that’s important when you’re six.
The plan is for her to wear the monitor for 30 days in the hopes of catching the rapid heart rate. However, there’s a chance that if she has quite a few episodes sooner than that, she won’t have to continue to wear it the full 30 days. So… if it’s going to happen, we’re hoping for sooner rather than later; she keeps begging for me to take it off of her, and I don’t know what to say to convince her to keep it on without scaring her. Right now I’m sticking with, ‘you NEED to keep it on’ and some, ‘because I said so’.
That’s all I’ve got for now – thanks to everyone for your thoughts and prayers.
Philippians 4:6
